Craft Is King! (Or Queen!)

I've been asked lately by quite a few new writers how can they know when they're ready to publish.

I can't answer that question. Things have changed so much since I made the decision to self-publish. I judged my skills by the answers I received from agents and editors to my queries. The most common response I received was summarized thusly, "Love your style. Love your story. I don't know how to sell this."

I don't know how to sell this.

To me, that said they didn't want to find a new voice. They didn't want to create a new market. They were looking for an easy sell.

I can't really fault the agents and editors for that attitude. As a business person, you always want the best return on your investment (ROI) you can get.

Except I thought I  could find a market for my stories. Maybe I was pretentious. Maybe I was full of myself. But I did find market for the stories I wrote.

The key was that I'd mastered the basics of the craft of writing. I knew how to plot. I learned about the different points-of-view (POV) from which the story can be told. I'd mastered basic grammar when I was writing a magazine column.

That's not to say I don't make mistakes. I do. But that's a lot different than not understanding the difference between first person POV and omniscient POV. And for the record, I don't think there's a damn thing wrong with omniscient if it works for your story.

Unfortunately, there's a lot of folks releasing books before they've mastered these basics. That's their decision, but then they pitch a fit when readers ding them on reviews for misspelled words, bad grammar, and huge plot holes.

So please don't ask me if you're reading to publish. It really depends on you. Do you think you can sell enough copies to earn back your investment in your book?

There's a better question to ask yourself. Do you feel confident enough in your basic abilities to put yourself out there to be criticized? Because that's what we do when we publish.

Lessons Learned: Return on Investment - Part I

In all the hubbaloo over The Passive Voice, Steven Zacharius of Kensington, Barry Eisler, Robert Gottlieb of Trident Media Group and the infamous Writers Digest poll, people are trying to frame the issue as traditional publishing versus indie publishing.

People are asking the wrong damn question. If you are writer who wants to be published, you should be asking, "What's the return on my investment?"

The return on an investment is when you divide the gain of the investment minus the cost of the investment by the cost of the investment. Or

ROI = (GOI - COI)/COI

I'm going to walk through two examples: one to show my ignorance as a indie publisher in the beginning and one to show how I did it right. I'm going to simplify a few numbers for math clarity.

Example 1
Seasons of Magick: Spring was the first book I put up as an indie author.

It's approximately 20K words. At the time, I wrote about 500 words per hour, so it took me 40 hours to write the story. Let's say I, the publisher, paid me, the writer, $10 an hour.

I paid a friend's teen daughter $25 to create a Photoshop file for my cover.

A friend and I edited each other's novellas over coffee, so throw in $10 for my Starbucks card.

I know just enough HTML to be dangerous so I formatted this myself using freeware.

My costs of investment? $400 + $25 + $10 + $0 = $435.

I priced the book at $0.99. 99 copies sold the first year it was on the market. Again, for simplicity's sake, let's say I made Amazon's rate of $0.35 for all the copies (which really isn't far from the truth). My gain on investment in Year 1? 99 X $0.35 = $34.65

Therefore, my ROI for this book is ($34.65 - $435)/$435 = - $0.92

Now the nice thing is this book will be available (hopefully) for the rest of my life plus seventy years. Odds are it will eventually earn a positive ROI.

Example 2
A year after I started indie publishing I wrote a BDSM erotic romance. Since I'm not ready to reveal Alter Ego, we'll call it Sluts in the City #1.

Again, this novella was 20K words so my costs as a writer remained the same. So did my editing costs.

By now, I'd learned my lesson about having a decent cover. I'd bought the picture to the left for $8 with the intention of using it for the cover until I saw how many covers, both indie and trad, used it. So I bought a different cover at Romance Novel Covers for $15.

I used freeware to tweak the picture and add the title and author's name by myself. (I had a lot of fun experimenting, too!) Again, I did my own formatting.

My costs of investment? $400 + $10 + $23 + $0 = $433

I priced the book at $2.99. My income per copy ranges from $1.05 to $2.68, so once again, let's use $2.00 for ease of math. The first year I sold 1,481 copies so my gain on investment was 1481 X $2.00 = $2962.00.

Therefore, my ROI for Sluts in the City #1 is ($2962 - $433)/$433 = $5.84

$5.84 versus -$0.92. See the difference?

Two erotica novellas. Same length. Same amount of time they were on sale. Little to no marketing.

The two big differences were the covers and the price. Both had a significant impact on my income.

On Monday, I'll talk about determining ROI for an indie published project, an assisted publishing project, and a trad published project.

On Wednesday, I'll talk about why using a picture like the Handcuffed Girl above will hurt more than help you thanks to the Kernel Pornocalypse.

Until then, stay toasty this weekend!